The present invention relates to billiard balls and in particular to an improved method of making a molded billiard ball utilizing thermoset resins and the product thereof.
The game of billiards and its several variations have been played and enjoyed for hundreds of years. Prior to the Civil War, all billiard balls were made of ivory. About that time, the demand for ivory became much greater than the supply and the principal domestic importer and distributor of billiard balls offered a reward of $10,000 to anyone who developed a high quality ball made out of anything other than ivory. As a result, the plastic composition billiard ball was developed.
Over the years many improvements were made in the art of manufacturing billiard balls. The major improvement came shortly after World War II with the introduction of the cast resin billiard ball. The casting method produces an extremely high quality ball, but entails a rather expensive manufacturing process. There was also developed an injection molding method of forming billiard balls utilizing expanded thermoplastic injection molding techniques. The injection molding method entails a shorter manufacturing process than the cast resin process but does not produce a ball of the caliber of a cast ball because of internal voids and the lack of other quality characteristics caused by the use of thermoplastic resins in this process. The internal voids in an injection molded thermoplastic ball unbalances the ball as a result of which it will not interact with other balls in a precisely predictable fashion and will not roll straight or true even on a good quality table. For this reason, all quality billiard balls have been formed by the expensive cast resin technique heretofore.
The familiar billiard ball set consists of 16 balls; one all white (the cue ball), eight of various solid colors with a pair of opposed white inserts bearing numbers (the 1-8 balls), and seven white balls with stripes of varying colors bearing numbers on the stripes (the 9-15 balls).
It is the principal object of the present invention to provide an improved numbered billiard ball having the high quality of conventional cast resin balls and some of the cost savings of injection molded balls.